“Find the Joy”: A War Correspondent’s Tweets and the Rise of an Affective Age in News

Abstract

AbstractThis study provides empirical support for undertheorized phenomena in contemporary digital news reporting—the foregrounding of joy-based news values and the presentation of affective, immanent atmospheres—as they manifest in U.S. National Public Radio correspondent Tim Mak’s daily Twitter threads from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Multimodal textual analysis of 647 tweets over 31 threads shows how affordances of newer media platforms facilitate a shift toward affective, immanent, and engaged journalism that blends traditional news style and judgment seamlessly with personal observations, contextual curation, stream-of-consciousness detail selection, and audience interaction to produce a kind of hybrid journalism that might foreshadow a transformation not just in reporters’ interaction with audiences, but also in an undertheorized reorientation to news itself.Keywords: Affectimmanencejoymultimodal analysisnews valuesnon-representational theorytextual analysisTwitter Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Mak later returned for additional reporting.2 An anonymous reviewer has pointed out that, after this paper was submitted, the Dalai Lama encouraged a child during a public ceremony to “suck my tongue,” an act that has been variably characterized as a case of abuse or a cultural misunderstanding (Pundir Citation2023). This puts the researcher in a difficult yet familiar position, as many people whom scholars have cited through the ages have engaged in controversial or reprehensible behavior. I present the intellectual framework of joy here independently of the Lama’s recent actions and their interpretations.3 Twitter was purchased by billionaire iconoclast Elon Musk in October 2022, throwing the platform into chaos. While its fundamental affordances remain basically intact as of this writing, the site is regressing in numerous ways and is now apparently called X.4 All tweets are quoted as best as possible exactly according to the spelling, abbreviations, and punctuation Mak used. Line breaks are occasionally, but not always, preserved to reproduce specific formal effects.